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ple. I think it’s a very pretty compensation. If we can’t have
youth within us we can have it outside, and I really think
we see it and feel it better that way. Of course we must be in
sympathy with itthat I shall always be. I don’t know that I
shall ever be ill-natured with old people—I hope not; there
are certainly some old people I adore. But I shall never be
anything but abject with the young; they touch me and ap-
peal to me too much. I give you carte blanche then; you can
even be impertinent if you like; I shall let it pass and hor-
ribly spoil you. I speak as if I were a hundred years old, you
say? Well, I am, if you please; I was born before the French
Revolution. Ah, my dear, je viens de loin; I belong to the old,
old world. But it’s not of that I want to talk; I want to talk
about the new. You must tell me more about America; you
never tell me enough. Here I’ve been since I was brought
here as a helpless child, and it’s ridiculous, or rather it’s
scandalous, how little I know about that splendid, dreadful,
funny country—surely the greatest and drollest of them all.
There are a great many of us like that in these parts, and I
must say I think we’re a wretched set of people. You should
live in your own land; whatever it may be you have your nat-
ural place there. If we’re not good Americans we’re certainly
poor Europeans; we’ve no natural place here. We’re mere
parasites, crawling over the surface; we haven’t our feet in
the soil. At least one can know it and not have illusions. A
woman perhaps can get on; a woman, it seems to me, has no
natural place anywhere; wherever she finds herself she has
to remain on the surface and, more or less, to crawl. You
protest, my dear? you’re horrified? you declare you’ll never

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